Teaching Material

04 July 2018

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Developing Writing Skills

(Reading time: 3 - 5 minutes)

The developing of the language skills has always been a very hard and interesting task. The process of writing suggests that we can actually teach students how to write with coherence, an appropiate grammar structure and an acceptable spelling. One of the effective ways to do this is to motivate the students and make them aware of the steps involved in effective writing.

Development

When we talk about writing it is necessary to remember that there are three inseparable aspects when teaching it. Writing as a channel of a foreign language is the use of it alongside listening, speaking and reading in the process of learning important elements of the language. Writing as a goal of a FL learning is the development of writing skills to fulfil such purposes as: note-taking, summarising, narrating, reporting for various real-life situations and writing with cohesion. It is the employment of various linguistic means by which the parts of a written text are related to one another, with continuity and organisation.

In our times, there is an increasing tendency of showing communication rather than the mere practice of linguistic forms. But we have to be careful because texts are made of sentences put together for communicative purposes. That is, you can not make bricks without straw and you cannot build houses without bricks.

But how can a teacher motivate the students for the writing activity? The writing activities should be linked to the real life whenever possible and take into account the learners’ needs and interests. As it is known, writing is considered a very complex task for teachers and mainly for students. The heart of the language lessons is the communicative activity itself, so modern courses of English as a FL contain suggestions for many practical teaching ideas such as:

When trying to choose the right methodological approach for teaching writing, questions like those below, always arise:A) How and when do you think grammar explanations are necessary?B) Do you think there is no communication when grammar is not well used in writing?C) How can the teaching/learning process be activated?

On the other hand, students should learn grammar rules, hear and read authentic English as much as they can, look at the vocabulary notes everyday and other necessary activities to develop the writing skills.

4 reasons why students dislike writing

1. It leaves a more permanent record of profiency than speaking; so it seems a threat for them. 2. Students feel that they lack sufficient knowledge of the language. 3. Students believe that writing must be grammatically correct. 4. They think that formal correctness must be achieved at their very first attempt.

Dictation

Dictation is one of the writing activities to practice writing; it also develops listening-understanding skills. It has usually been considered a boring teaching activity by many persons, but we should see it as an encouraging exercise. We need to brainstorm a new methodology for dictation. Pictures about dictation can change if we ask some questions and answer them putting into practice creative and practical teaching ideas, questions like:A) Who gives the dictation and who to? B) Who controls the pace of the dictation? C) Who chooses or creates the text? D) Who corrects it?

Of course, if all the power remains in the hands of the teacher, we have a traditional approach of dictation, but dictation could be otherwise. Dictation taking as a potential practical teaching activity for writing has some advantages, among them:

Improves spelling

Students are active during and after the exercise.

Fosters unconscious thinking when they hear important things.

Copes with mixed-ability groups.

Gives access to interesting texts.

Teachers should be facilitators and are responsible of creating the best possible conditions for learning. So, we will list some useful and practical teaching ideas for the developing of the writing skills: It is very important to teach pronunciation in English , the different signs of punctuations (e.g. coma, period, brackets, quotations, semi colon, etc) in order to identify them when taking dictation.

7 effective writing strategies

Writing of sentences, paragraphs, compositions

Provide problem solving tasks. For instance: Give a suitable end to this story/ If you were in this situation what would you do, write it. Summarize the patient’s medical history from their charts, etc.

Writing of authentic texts linked to real life situations such as: notes, postcards, letters, commercials, summaries for research works, etc.Linguistic games such as: Crosswords, Word Association, Guessing the word, etc.

Checking dictation by means of interchanging the student’s notebooks, giving a correct model on board as a guide for corrections.

Exercises of different types using connectors; the use of them are indispensable for a right coherence.

Reading a given text 2 or 3 times and then students have to remember as much as they can to write it (it could be developed in teams). Give the winner.

They could be modified using other kind of categories.

A practical teaching idea may be the solution to avoid “boring lessons” in the English learning process. Theory and Practice must always be together to get good results in learning any foreign language, as well as, making a right use of a variety of methodological approaches. •